To deny education to illegal immigrants could have a negative repercussion in the overall progress of the country. Ignorance disintegrates nations and leads people to chaos.

An information piece recently distributed by a Washington-based newswire agency to the media, dealing with the cost of the education of the illegal aliens in the United States, is creating controversy and splitting the public opinion apart.

It claims that more that 7 billion dollars are being spent to educate undocumented children and adolescents and should be used otherwise. What the newswire doesn’t make clear is if the 7 billions are spent annually or spread through a determined number of years. And even thought the information is attributed to the Census Bureau there is no hard evidence to substantiate this claim. Moreover, alternative sources to balance the piece are not mentioned or quoted.

But, even if it were true to the last word, what is wrong with educating illegal children?

Persons and entities that disagree with the instruction and intellectual development of illegal children must have an erroneous concept of the meaning of education.

Additionally, to blame the imbalance of the states budgets, as they do, on the money spent to educate undocumented children is a gross exaggeration. What is bleeding the country and weakening the economy is the money spent in the poorly justified war against Iraq—which end is not foreseeable. To make it worse, the tax breaks given to the mega corporations don’t help the country or the average individual either.

If the budget allocated by the states for the education of children is stretched to help the education of illegal children as well that is not a mistake but a wise and fair decision that will benefit everyone in the long run.

The process of educating the new generations of the country, including the undocumented, is a shared responsibility, as taxpayers and human beings.

What good can come from denying education to this segment of the population? The children of the illegal immigrants whether the extreme right likes or not, will be part of the America of the future.

But there is always someone ready to look for a scapegoat when the economy fails and people willing to point their accusatory finger towards the undocumented.

People already know that health insurance is a problem in the country and that more and better teachers and technological equipment are needed in the schools everywhere, particularly in the communities populated by immigrants. But to deny undocumented children of the education they are receiving would not only be a counterproductive measure but also a cruel gesture that won’t help the national educational project as a whole.

If immigration laws were enforced, and people from underdeveloped countries stopped arriving to the United States, the economy would be seriously affected without the inexpensive labor they provide. And it is not just a handful of companies that benefit from the work of the illegal immigrants. It’s a large number of industries that employ these laborers in very large numbers to work at the lowest levels of the job market scale.

The intention to prevent education from reaching illegal children is discriminatory and almost a segregation of sorts.

Without meaning offense it is said that President George W. Bush, a graduate from Yale University, sometimes during his speeches bumps into difficult words that make him slow his reading pace.

Some other times his vocabulary fails him when answering questions during press conferences. More than once it has been said that he is astute but far from brilliant. Is this president a man that values education differently?

An uneducated-undocumented population can be kept at the margin of the countries’ development and indefinitely tamed. Is that the intention of those who see the number of undocumented Latinos grow in number?

To deny education to illegal immigrants could have a negative repercussion in the overall progress of the country. Ignorance disintegrates nations and leads people to chaos.